zap2it decided to get out of the free TV listings business (and I’d like to thank them for maintaining free listings for as long as they did!). There’s a replacement, subscription-based service called for MythTV users Schedules Direct, but converting to it requires some database changes, which essentially meant “upgrade!”. So I did; to KnoppMyth R5F1.

This was a major upgrade; kernel 2.4 to 2.6, and MythTV from 0.16 to 0.20, so I was expecting trouble. I made a complete disk2disk copy of my PVRs harddrive, and then ran the KnoppMyth backup utilities also.

As it turns out, KnoppMyth is suprisingly easy to upgrade. All of my important settings were copied over intact, and the box did sort of work after the reboots. However, I had to do a number of things manually:

convert my tv listings source from zap2it to schedulesdirect. Unfortunately, this required re-building MythTV from source, which took all day.

Recompile the kernel without the vesafb driver (which I remembered thanks to my old posting: PVR 250 and MythTV)

get my Matrox G400 tv-out working, which was basically copy over my old scripts that would sync the framebuffers and adjust the video output

fix the audio volumes, again

rebuild the lirc modules, since the kernel source I grabbed from mysettopbox.tv didn’t have these modules already

That was about it. It dig take all day (kernel and myth rebuilds are slow on a PIII-933), but the box seems to be working ok; playback of TV and DivX works, I can record TV shows, and (the reason for the upgrade!) I have TV listings again…

One issue: the console is totally useless until X starts; something is setting the framebuffer to a very strange mode. That’s a problem for another day…